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Taco trucks: As American as lo mein and pizza pie

Our stomachs eventually conquer our worst politics, it seems. Just look at the food courts across America.

Pizza, hamburgers, lo mein - the foods of people America once tried to kick out.

The latest gastronomic absurdity in politics came recently, after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump gave another grim speech about the impact of immigrants on America, and the co-founder of Latinos for Trump, Marco Gutierrez, underscored Trump's hard-line views.

"My culture is a very dominant culture, and it's imposing - and it's causing problems," Gutierrez said on MSNBC. "If you don't do something about it, you're going to have taco trucks on every corner."

They're worried about taco trucks on every corner?

Bah. Look at what all that anti-Italian immigration legislation of the 1920s did to stop the folks coming over from Italy.

Today we've got more than 73,000 pizza joints in America. The horror.

This ridiculous routine - hate them, fear them, fight them, accept them - has happened to all of the food-court immigrants in our nation's history. (You know, the folks who freaked everyone out when they got here but now dominate every food court in the country - Italians, Chinese, Germans.)

And the food court is a great way to see how absurd our immigration stances - from anti-Italian legislation to the taco-truck affair to growing waves of Islamophobia - are.

Let's start with Mexican food, because taco trucks have been all the rage lately.

Osiris Hoil has shown how menacing these taco trucks can be.

Born in Yucatan, Mexico, Hoil came to America on a visitor visa and - after working in a restaurant, getting married and working in construction - opened a taco stand in an office-heavy part of Virginia, parked it right between a Chipotle and a Baja Fresh. Talk about every corner.

That was the beginning of District Taco, a Washington, D.C., chain which now has multiple restaurants and is about to employ nearly 400 people.

"Remember, I was laid off in 2008, that's how I started this business," Hoil said. "And now we're a big corporation."

When he was starting out with the taco stand, he got up at 4 a.m. and went to bed at 10 p.m. Every day. It was a lot of hard, honest work. Now, as an executive, he gets up at 5 a.m. but still doesn't make it to bed until 10 every night.

He said Gutierrez's taco-truck comment was so funny, so absurd, he could hardly be angry at it.

The sentiment wasn't so different when waves of Italian immigrants were coming to America. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 were written to minimize the number or immigrants - especially Italians - coming.

Before that, 11 Italians were lynched in New Orleans in 1891, and hundreds were arrested, after a police chief was killed and some of the Italians charged in his assassination were acquitted. After that, the Ku Klux Klan began targeting Italians.

As for pizza and pasta jokes, they were everywhere (most too nasty to print).

And now, can you imagine a football season without a pizza party? It's as American as a hot dog.

Oh, wait. That brings us to Germans.

Think America embraced the forefathers of hot dogs and hamburgers?

"Unless the stream of their importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious," Benjamin Franklin warned of the waves of Germans coming to Pennsylvania in the 1750s. He called them the "most stupid of their nation."

Well, we forgot about that one quickly.

How about Chinese food?

Sure, General Tso's chicken is an Americanized take on the food of people who helped with the backbreaking labor of building a nation.

But when Congress authorized the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 - which aimed to curb Chinese immigration, citizenship, and business and land ownership - did the worst fears that prompted that law come true?

Not really. The threat was called "the Yellow Peril," and a people who were deemed "unassimilable" have become an integral part of the nation.

Any real complaints about the Chinese takeout on every corner?

Our stomachs do our smartest thinking . Our tables are the true indicators of the state of our nation's diversity.

Salsa, after all, has outpaced ketchup in sales in America for years, Hoil reminded me.

"This is still a country of great opportunity," Hoil said while driving between meetings over the weekend. "You can work hard. You can succeed. And that's part of the entrepreneurial dream. A taco truck is what all that hard work is about. How can this be bad?"

Petula Dvorak is a columnist for The Washington Post's local team who writes about homeless shelters, gun control, high heels, high school choirs, the politics of parenting, jails, abortion clinics, mayors, modern families, strip clubs and gas prices, among other things.